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| Photo by National Park Service |
Oral history archives exist in many
forms and many places. There are miles of audio taped interviews and
reams of laboriously typed transcripts from those interviews. Most of
these marvelous collections are useless to the average person because
they are not accessible. Story Chip started with the simple idea that
the technology now exists to make oral history as accessible as an
episode of a network sitcom. The more stories and archives become
available, the more history is available to the curious.
Since we have just experienced another
presidential inauguration, lets focus on one of the presidential
libraries. You hear about these as each president leaves office and
decides on a location for the archive of presidential records as part
of the public record for future research and administered by the
National Archives. Dwight Eisenhower's library is located in Abilene,
Kansas, where he was raised and, like most presidential libraries, it
contains an amazing amount of material about the man and his time in
office. It also contains an impressive collection of oral history
interviews, a small sample of which can be viewed on line.
To maintain perspective, Eisenhower was
president before the Department of Defense developed the first
computer network. Air Force One had propellers. Telephones were all
connected to land lines and had rotary dials. For any of these
interviews to be available on line indicates the amount of work
involved in maintaining any archive in a form that can be made
accessible. The Eisenhower Library collection of interviews is
typical of many that can be found all over the country. The
collections began as effort to use audio recording techniques in
creating a record of the voices and sounds of history. As audio has
moved from analog to digital recording and the physical size of the
medium has decreased, the effort has been to find ways to create
digital versions so that they can be more widely available.
The oral histories in Abilene contain
more than serious discussion of Eisenhower in war, politics and
foreign affairs. It is not surprising to find delightful insights
into the man and his family. One story told by White House speech
writer, John Bird, reminds everyone that presidential candidates are
not immune to the demands of family life. Bird was meeting with
Eisenhower and another writer on a Sunday morning about the text of
an upcoming speech. They had been working for a short while when
Mamie Eisenhower interrupted to announce that it was time to go to
church services. The General started to explain that he might need to
skip church only to have Mamie cut him off with “Well, if that's
the way you feel about it!” before she hurried out. Bird reports
Eisenhower got an uncomfortable look, stood and said, “That's all
boys.”
Barbara Eisenhower, the wife of Dwight
and Mamie's son John, described the difficulties of raising the four
presidential grandchildren in Washington. She eventually moved to the
family farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to provide the family a
quieter life, only to have the quiet of the farm interrupted by
visiting heads of state. She describes how the children were all
given small red stars by Nikita Krushchev and the innocence of youth
not being overwhelmed by power. When President Charles De Gaulle of
France visited Gettysburg, the youngest of the grandchildren asked
him why he wore such thick glasses. De Gaulle's answer, “I have
very bad eyes. Poor me.”
This is just a sample of the richness
that is out there in oral history collections all over the world. The
collection at the Eisenhower Library is typical in that is partially
available on line but in a limited version. The text cannot be
searched and delightful stories like these will be missed by many
readers who do not take the time read the thousands of pages of
transcripts. By including this description of these two stories, they
can now be found by search engines. People looking for information on
John Bird or Barbara Eisenhower will now find a reference and a link
to the material in Abilene.
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